Film fans often argue about the greatest year in screen history and 1990 always features prominently in the debate. Let's go back three decades and see what did year had to offer and what is in its legacy.
It might not have produced many masterpieces, but 1990 was a remarkable year for crowdpleasers. Indeed, so many enduring favourites were released during these 12 months that it's almost impossible to compile a Top 10 that will please everyone. Get in touch with your own 1990 favourites via our Facebook or Twitter page. And don't forget to check out Top Films of 1990: Vol. 1! Now that you're all caught up, let's continue our review of the 1990...
Getting More Serious
Mel Gibson might not have been everyone's idea of William Shakespeare's broodingly indecisive Dane, but he holds his own in august company in Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, which co-stars Glenn Close as Gertrude, Alan Bates as Claudius, Ian Holm as Polonius and Helena Bonham Carter as Ophelia. And talking of the Bard, simple courtiers Gary Oldman and Tim Roth always seem to be a couple of steps behind Prince Hamlet (Iain Glen), as they seek to make sense of the twisted events occurring at Elsinore in Tom Stoppard's inspired screen version of his own stage play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Joanne Woodward earned an Oscar nomination for her work as India Bridge, the inter-war wife trying to steer a course between her conservative lawyer husband, Walter (Paul Newman), and their progressive offspring, Carolyn (Margaret Welsh), Ruth (Kyra Sedgwick) and Douglas (Robert Sean Leonard) in Mr and Mrs Bridge, the Merchant Ivory adaptation of the novels of Evan S. Connell.
Elisabeth Moss made such an impact as June Osborne in the television series (2016-) that only those of a certain age will remember that Volker Schlöndorff was the first to visit Margaret Attwood's Gilead in a Harold Pinter-scripted version of The Handmaid's Tale, which starred Natasha Richardson as Kate/Offred, Faye Dunaway as Serena Joy and Robert Duvall as The Commander. Pinter also scripted Paul Schrader's take on Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers, which follows Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett on a marriage-saving vacation in Venice that is hijacked by the wealthily mysterious Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren.
Adapted from a novel by Paul Bowles, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky accompanies John Malkovich and Debra Winger on an ill-starred bid to revitalise their marriage during an arduous trek across North Africa. Unlike Peter Brook's 1963 monochrome version, Harry Hook departs significantly from William Golding's source novel in his adaptation of Lord of the Flies, which sees Ralph (Balthazar Getty), Jack (Chris Furrh), Piggy (Danuel Pipoly) and several other boys establish the rules of a community after being stranded on a Pacific island after a plane crash.
The life of Sung Neng Yee is chronicled by James F. Collier in China Cry, which stars Julia Nickson Soul as the daughter of a Shanghai doctor who endured hardships at the hands of the invading Japanese and the authoritarian Communists before becoming a human rights activist in Hong Kong. Sparks light up the bohemian cabal resident in 1930s Paris in Philip Kaufman's Henry & June, which centres on the tempestuous relationship between writers Henry Miller (Fred Ward) and Anais Nin (Maria De Medeiros), even though they are respectively married to June (Uma Thurman) and Hugo (Richard E. Grant). Staying with biopics, Jeremy Irons gives an Oscar-winning performance in Barbet Schroeder's Reversal of Fortune, as Danish-born socialite Claus von Bülow hires crack lawyer Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver) to defend him on the charge of murdering his wife, Sunny (Glenn Close).
Perhaps the most infamous movie of the year, however, was Brian De Palma's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, which went so spectacularly wrong that Julie Salamon wrote the bestseller, The Devil's Candy, about the wayward shoot. But was it as bad as the critics claimed? Take another look with Cinema Paradiso, as Wall Street trader Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) and paramour Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) find themselves embroiled in the battle between Judge Leonard White (Morgan Freeman) and District Attorney Abe Weiss (F. Murray Abraham) after their calamitous detour through the South Bronx.
Drawing on her relationship with Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher adapted her own autobiographical novel for Mike Nichols's Postcards From the Edge, which sees Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine excelling as recovering addict Suzanne Vale and her fading film star mother, Doris Mann. Cinema lore often looms large in the work of Peter Bogdanovich and, as prodigal daughter Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd) discovers at the start of Texasville, things have changed and not necessarily for the better in her home town of Anarene since the credits had rolled on The Last Picture Show (1971). Reuniting with screenwriter Larry McMurtry and cast members Cloris Leachman, Timothy Bottoms, Randy Quaid and Eileen Brennan, Bogdanovich checks up on how Jacy's old flame, Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges), is faring as a husband to Karla (Annie Potts) and a father to Dickie (William McNamara).
Susan Sarandon received a Golden Globe nomination for the earthy sensuality she displayed as hamburger waitress Nora Baker romancing preppy lawyer Max Baron (James Spader) in Luis Mendoki's cross-tracks age-gap melodrama, White Palace, and passions become equally inflamed when Carré Otis lands a job with a New York law firm and has to stand in for negotiator Jacqueline Bisset on a date with powerful client Mickey Rourke in Zalman King's erotic fantasy, Wild Orchid.
In Mo' Better Blues (1990), Spike Lee set out to show that not all black jazz musicians are addicts with a self-destructive streak. Denzel Washington headlines as a trumpeter whose indulgent attitudes towards saxophonist Wesley Snipes and his gambling manager (Lee) backfire on him as damagingly as his two-timing of girlfriends Cynda Williams and Joie Lee (who is the director's sister). The potency of New Black Cinema was further demonstrated in Charles Burnett's To Sleep With Anger. Waking from a fiery nightmare, Gideon (Paul Butler) welcomes charismatic drifter Harry Mention (Danny Glover) into his overcrowded home. However, when his host falls ill, Harry makes a move on Gideon's wife, Suzie (Mary Alice), as part of his malevolent bid to install himself as the head of the household.
As one of the first mainstream films to address the AIDS crisis, Norman René's Longtime Companion merits a place in screen history, as it details what happens to a group of gay friends, including Bruce Davison and Campbell Scott, between their meeting on Fire Island in 1981 and the rise of ACT UP at the end of a tragedy-strewn decade. Equally poignant, Penny Marshall's Awakenings is set in Bainbridge Hospital, New York in 1969 and follows the transformation that Dr Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams) manages to achieve with an experimental drug on Leonard Lowe (Robert de Niro), who has been in a near-catatonic state since contracting Sleeping Sickness in 1916.
Cuba on the eve of the Castro coup provides the setting for Sydney Pollack's Havana, as gambler Robert Redford finds himself falling for Lena Olin, the wife of revolutionary bigwig, Raúl Juliá. Iain Glen won the Best Actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival for his performance as Larry Winters in David Hayman's flashbacking biopic, Silent Scream, which sees the Scottish killer of a barman in 1963 Soho reflect upon his childhood and his time in the parachute regiment, while serving his sentence in an experimental unit at Barlinnie Jail.
Richard Harris gives one of the finest performances of his illustrious career as Bull McCabe, the Irish farmer desperate to win a land auction against an American interloper (Tom Berenger) in Jim Sheridan's compelling adaptation of John B. Keane's play, The Field. There's more Gallic gruffness on show in David Leland's adaptation of William McIlvanney's novel, The Big Man, which stars Liam Neeson as a Scottish miner who becomes a bare-knuckle boxer during a prolonged strike and falls foul of Glasgow gangster Billy Connolly.
John G. Avildsen, the director of 1976's Oscar-winning saga about the Italian Stallion, returns for Rocky V, which sees Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) quit the ring and move into a rundown apartment in South Philadelphia with wife Adrian (Talia Shire) and their son, Rocky, Jr. (Sage Stallone), in order to train promising pug, Tommy Gunn (Tommy Morrison). Also dreaming of sporting glory, Cole Trickle (Tom Cruise) is on the verge of stock car fame with ace mechanic Harry Hogge (Robert Duvall) when he loses his nerve after a fiery crash in Tony Scott's Days of Thunder (now available on 4K Blu-ray as well). Can neurosurgeon Claire Lewicki (Nicole Kidman) help him before the Winston Cup at the Daytona 500?
Tom and Nicole were 1990's couple du jour, unless, of course, you include Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost. Everyone remembers the pottery scene involving Molly Jenson, Sam Wheat and The Righteous Brothers rendition of 'Unchained Melody'. Yet it was Whoopi Goldberg who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her turn as medium Oda Mae Brown in Jerry Zucker's supernatural love story. Moore's sobbing was heart-rending. But no one cries like Juliet Stevenson in Anthony Minghella's Truly, Madly, Deeply. However, the grieving widow soon comes to find the spirit of cellist husband Alan Rickman a bit of a handful, especially when he's accompanied by some demandingly eccentric spectral friends (one of whom is a big fan of Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni, 1953).
Prince turned director on Graffiti Bridge, as he reprised the role of The Kid from Albert Magnoli's Purple Rain (1984), in a musical sequel that chronicles the rivalry between the Glam Slam and the Pandemonium clubs. But the focus is firmly on the dance halls of Harlem in Jennie Livingston's documentary, Paris Is Burning, which recalls the heyday of drag queens like Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija and Dorian Corey, who represented their 'houses' in the vogueing contests that provided an escape from the poverty, bigotry and homophobia of everyday life.
Meanwhile, In the Rest of the World
There's Second World War intrigue as Marco Hofschneider gives a composed performance as a young Jewish boy whose survival instinct serves him well in both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa, whose Oscar-nominated screenplay was inspired by the remarkable exploits of Solomon Perel.
Novelist Anthony Burgess provided the much-admired subtitles for Jean-Paul Rappeneau's garlanded adaptation of Edmond Rostand's play, Cyrano de Bergerac, which earned Gérard Depardieu an Oscar nomination for his towering performance as the swashbuckling Parisian poet who agrees to help the tongue-tied Christian de Neuvillette (Vincent Perez) woo the beautiful Roxane (Anne Brochet), as he knows he can never win her heart himself because of his prominent nose.
Impeccably produced though this was, Yves Robert achieved the acme of Gallic nostalgia in La Gloire de mon père and Le Château de ma mère, which were adapted from the memoirs of Marcel Pagnol and recall how unwordly tweenager Marcel (Julien Ciamaca) spent two idyllic fin de siècle summers in the Provençal countryside with his teacher father, Joseph (Philippe Caubère), his mother Augustine (Nathalie Roussel), his Uncle Jules (Didier Pain) and his Aunt Rose (Thérèse Liotard).
Les Evénéments of 1968 provide the backdrop for Louis Malle's sophisticated domestic comedy, Milou en Mai, which sees the funeral of matriarch Pauline Dubost turn into a squabbling match between her offspring, Michel Piccoli, Miou-Miou and Michel Duchaussoy and her lesbian granddaughter, Dominique Blanc. Coming up to date, Tsilla Chelton contributes a wonderful display of malicious mischief to Étienne Chatilliez's dark domestic farce, Tatie Danielle, as a demanding old lady who makes life hell for nephew Eric Prat and his wife, Caherine Jacob, after they take her in following the death of her housekeeper. However, au pair Isabelle Nanty is made of sterner stuff.
Finnish maestro Aki Kaurismäki completed the Proletariat Trilogy launched by Shadows in Paradise (1986) and Ariel (1988) with The Match Factory Girl, which features a standout performance by Kati Outinen as the mousy outcast who is browbeaten by her mother and stepfather and spurned by the men at the local dance hall, Everything changes, however, when she becomes pregnant. Newly released from an institution, psychiatric patient Antonio Banderas hits upon a novel way of persuading former porn star Victoria Abril to marry him in Pedro Almodóvar's kinky comedy, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, while Ricky Tognazzi demonstrates that the English Disease wasn't confined solely to the Football League in Ultra, as his headstrong hoodlum joins a band of AS Roma fanatics en route to Turin to trade blows with the firm sporting the black and white of Juventus.
Centring on the ménage that develops in the early 20th-century countryside between silk dyer Li Wei, adoptive nephew Li Baotian and new wife Gong Li, Zhang Yimou and Yang Fengliang's Ju Dou was ravishingly photographed in Technicolor and confirmed the emergence of the Beijing Film Academy's Fifth Generation of graduates by becoming the first Chinese film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Another master of the painterly image, Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai, started the trilogy that would be completed by In the Mood For Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) with Days of Being Wild, which is set in the early 1960s and charts Leslie Cheung's affairs with shopgirl Maggie Cheung and cabaret dancer Carina Lau, while he searches for the mother he never knew.
Akira Kurosawa returned to directing for the first time in five years with Dreams. Steven Spielberg help cajole Warner Bros into contributing to the budget for this anthology of folklore, visions and nightmares, which includes special effects provided by George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic company and a cameo performance by Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh. But the subtitled highlight of the year was Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up, a work of enduring brilliance that examines identity, celebrity and the myth-making potency of cinema in showing how film buff Hossein Sabzian cons a Teheran family into believing that he is lauded Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and that they are going to star in his next picture.
Leave 'Em Laughing
The year 1990 wasn't a banner year for animation. But Cinema Paradiso still has a pre-CGI quartet to keep younger viewers amused. If you wondered what happened to Snow White and her handsome prince after the Brothers Grimm fairytale ended, check out John Howley's Happily Ever After to see how the pair cope with the arrival of the Wicked Queen's brother, Lord Maliss, from the Realm of Doom. Sticking with the classics, the fables of ETA Hoffman were mined by Paul Schibli for The Nutcracker Prince, an animated fantasy featuring the voices of Kiefer Sutherland as Prince Hans, Peter O'Toole as Pantaloon and Phyllis Diller as the Mouse Queen.
Helped by Wilbur the albatross (John Candy), ace agents Bernard (Bob Newhart) and Bianca (Zsa Zsa Gabor) fly across the world to help a boy named Cody protect a Great Eagle from dastardly hunter Percival C. McLeach (George C. Scott) in Hendel Butoy and Mike Gabriel's Disney animation, The Rescuers Down Under, which follows on from John Lounsbery's The Rescuers (1977). Completing the 1990 cartoon foursome, an old TV favourite reached the big screen in Jetsons: The Movie, as animation legends William Hanna and Joseph Barbera whisk viewers into the 21st century to reveal what happens when George Jetson gets a promotion at Spacely Sprockets and Spindles and has to relocate to an asteroid hurtling through outer space with his wife Jane, children Judy and Elroy, Rosie the Robot and Astro the family dog.
Moving into the realm of romcom, we're guessing that you don't need us to tell you what happens in Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman, when high-flying financier Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) hires prostitute Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) to escort him and his credit cards around Los Angeles. But if you're yet to see why Roberts added an Oscar nomination to her Golden Globe statuette, why not add the third highest-grossing film of 1990 to your wishlist? While you're about it, why not put Green Card on there, too? Having contracted a marriage of convenience with horticulturalist Brontë Parrish (Andie MacDowell) so that he can stay in the United States, Frenchman Georges Fauré (Gérard Depardieu) has to prove to the Immigration and Naturalization Service that the union is legitimate in Peter Weir's Golden Globe-winning romcom, which also brought Depardieu the award for Best Actor.
A beautiful friendship seems to be coming to an end in Emile Ardolino's Three Men and a Little Lady, as actress Sylvia Bennington-Mitchell (Nancy Travis) moves out of the nest she had shared with her young daughter and the doting trio of Peter Mitchell (Tom Selleck), Michael Kellam (Steve Guttenberg) and Jack Holden (Ted Danson) in order to marry British director Edward Hargreave (Christopher Cazenove).
The debuting Christina Ricci steals the show in Richard Benjamin's droll adaptation of Patty Dann's novel, Mermaids, which follows the travails of 1960s Jewish teenager Charlotte Flax (Winona Ryder), whose hopes of becoming a nun are not helped by her younger sister, Kate (Ricci), or her mother, Rachel (Cher), who keeps moving whenever life becomes too complicated. Maybe things will be different when they settle in Eastport, Massachusetts and Rachel makes the acquaintance of the kindly, but unprepossessing Lou Landsky (Bob Hoskins) ? Ryder resurfaces as aspiring 14 year-old artist Dinky Bossetti, who is so bored in her adopted home in Clyde, Ohio that she convinces herself that she is the illegitimate daughter of the sleepy town's sole celebrity. But she needs Denton Webb (Jeff Daniels) to supply her with some answers in Jim Abrahams's wittily winning rite of passage, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael.
By day, Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) is a quiet student in Phoenix, Arizona. Once he's in the privacy of his own room, however, he turns into FM pirate radio sensation 'Hard Harry' in Allan Moyle's coming-of-age drama, Pump Up the Volume. However, Principal Loretta Creswood (Annie Ross) is determined to take him off the air. Expanded from a Harvard student project and originally slated to star Will Smith and Jeff Townes, Reginald Hudlin's House Party was a key entry in the development of hip hop cinema, as rappers Christopher 'Kid' Reid and Christopher 'Play' Martin have to overcome stern parents and a mean class bully to stage the party of the year with their loopy pal, Martin Lawrence.
Johnny Depp has much to thank Gary Oldman and Toms Cruise and Hanks for, as their disinclination meant he landed one of the best parts of his chequered career in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, which begins with Avon lady Peg Boggs getting more than she bargained for when she calls at a Gothic manor and discovers a lonely boy with blades for fingers who develops an attachment for her daughter, Winona Ryder. Depp also forms part of one of the coolest casts ever assembled in John Waters's Cry-Baby, a trash delight set in 1954 Baltimore that sees poor little rich girl Allison Vernon-Williams (Amy Locane) attempt to bridge the gap between the 'drapes' and the 'squares' when she falls for delinquent classmate Wade Walker (Depp), who is famous for being able to cry a single tear.
Debuting writer-director Whit Stillman earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Metropolitan, which chronicles the Manhattan experiences with the Sally Fowler Rat Pack of naive Princeton student Tom Townsend (Edward Clements). At the Oscars, Stillman found himself up against Woody Allen, who drew on Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (1965) for Alice, in which acupuncturist Keye Luke gives Mia Farrow some magic herbs that will help her decide between dullard husband William Hurt and hip jazz musician Joe Mantegna.
Alan Alda directs and stars in Betsy's Wedding, which sees a proud construction contractor get involved with the loan sharks known to brother Joe Pesci in order to give daughter Molly Ringwald a day to remember. Cartoonist Gene Wilder becomes similarly obsessed with fatherhood in Leonard Nimoy's Funny About Love, but neither wife Christine Lahti nor lover Mary Stuart Masterson seem to be quite so eager to become parents.
The late great Carl Reiner directs Kirstie Alley in Sibling Rivalry, in which an aspiring writer makes an appalling discovery after a fatal one-night stand with stranger Sam Elliott in a bid to break the monotony of her marriage to dull doctor Scott Bakula. A year after director Amy Heckerling had introduced us to James and Mollie Ubriacco (John Travolta and Kirstie Alley) in Look Who's Talking, they have to cope with the arrival of baby Julie (Roseanne Barr) in Look Who's Talking Too, which makes it no easier for big brother Mikey (Bruce Willis) to deal with the strain of potty training.
Rather overlooked in the rush back in 1990, Lawrence Kasdan's I Love You to Death has all the makings of a cult classic, as Tacoma housewife Tracey Ullman grows so tired of pizza maker husband Kevin Kline's philandering that she enlists the help of mother Joan Plowright, stoner hitmen cousins William Hurt and Keanu Reeves, and doting busboy River Phoenix to send him to that great pizzeria in the sky. Despite sharing a restaurant theme - courtesy of novice caterer Timothy Spall - Mike Leigh's third theatrical feature, Life Is Sweet, may be utterly different in tone, but it's just as distinctive, as it charts Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent's efforts to encourage plumber daughter Claire Skinner to go her own way, while keeping an eye on the more eccentric antics of her anorexic sister, Jane Horrocks, and her oddball boyfriend, David Thewlis.
In truth, James D. Parriott was rather lucky to have attracted actors of the calibre of Bob Hoskins, and Denzel Washington to his offbeat buddy comedy, Heart Condition. But the two gel well in the story of a vice cop (Hoskins) who has to hunt down the drug dealers of the lawyer (Washington) whose heart was used in the transplant that saved the bigoted lawman's life. It's also a case of never mind the premise, focus on the performances with Bob Clark's off-the-wall comedy, Loose Cannons, which pairs hard-nosed cop Gene Hackman with new partner Dan Aykroyd (who has multiple personality disorder) in a bid to find a sex tape featuring Adolf Hitler and a man running in the election to become the new chancellor of West Germany.
Back in 1990, Arthur Hiller's Taking Care of Business was a hip odd-couple comedy because prison fugitive James Belushi finds a lost filofax and assumes the life of its owner, yuppie Charles Grodin. But personal organisers look rather quaint in the cellphone era. With ex-wife Pamela Reed and lovers Lori Petty and Fran Drescher on his case, the last thing salesman Robin Williams needs in Roger Donaldson's Cadillac Man is biker Tim Robbins storming into Turgeon Auto Sales in Queens with an AK-47 and a conviction that wife Annabella Sciorra is cheating on him.
Binmen Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez long to open a surfing shop. But their dream seems more distant than ever when they become embroiled in a toxic waste scandal in Estevez's buddy comedy, Men At Work. Echoes of Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) can be heard in Jonathan Lynn's Nuns on the Run, a HandMade romp in which fugitive crooks Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane take the veil in Janet Suzman's convent to keep out of the clutches of a dead gangster's murderous henchmen.
As LAPD narcotics officer John Kimble (Arnold Schwarzenegger) needs the evidence of a runaway wife to convict a notorious dealer, he has to go undercover as a teacher at an elementary school in Astoria, Oregon in Ivan Reitman's family comedy, Kindergarten Cop.
John Ritter has a hard time being a son to sporting goods dealer Jack Warden in Dennis Dugan's Problem Child. But he quickly discovers that being a father is tougher than it looks when he and wife Amy Yasbeck adopt pesky seven year-old Michael Oliver. The latter would drift away from acting after making Brian Levant's Problem Child 2 (1991). But a star was born the moment that Macaulay Culkin put after shave on his face in Chris Columbus's Home Alone, which delights in showing how eight year-old Kevin McAllister is accidentally left behind from a Christmas vacation and resorts to cartoonish violence in order to defend the family hearth from a pair of hilariously incompetent Chicago crooks, Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern). Thirsty for more? You could always try Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992).
And that's a wrap! Of our 1990's overview in two volumes. Have we missed a cult favourite? Connect with us on social media and tell us what you think!
